Category: Uncategorized

I went for a walk today with my family on Mackworth island. My wife snapped this photo of my daughter up on my shoulders.

It was a beautiful day for a walk on a simple trail, with gorgeous views, fairy houses, amazing air, and my digital camera.

…can be found on this Katrina timeline.

I just made a few minor changes to this site. There is now a BlogThis! icon at the top left, for both myself to use as well as anyone who uses Blogger who happens upon this site.

Secondly, I put a link just below that to my audioscrobbler page.

Lastly, I switched the comments infrastructure from HaloScan over to the native Blogger comments. Cool.

Another John Chuckman article is definitely worth reading. I love Chuckman, in that appreciate-a-vitriolic-rant kind of way.

OK, first of all, as some background, the Department of Homeland Security (in their infinite wisdom) recommends that people not use Internet Explorer for security reasons. Yet, in the aftermath of Katrina, the FEMA web site requires that one use IE to apply for post-Katrina assistance.

Typical. And this is emblematic of the problems our great government is having. The left hand not knowing about the right, etc etc etc.

I updated my Linux on a Toshiba Satellite M35X-S149 page with a fresh documentation of my Linux install. The section that starts with “Ubuntu Linux (Hoary Hedgehog)” is the new stuff.

…and it rocks. Sheesh, I’ve missed KDE. Check it out for yourself. Unbelievable the amount of software that comes for free.

And, let it be known, amaroK is the music player for Linux that I’ve been waiting for for years and years and years. Playlist generation, automagic album cover downloading, automatic lyric fetching, easy CD burning right from the player, etc etc etc. And it’s even compatible with audioscrobbler, so anyone who cares will be able to discern what kind of music I listen to with up-to-the-minute detail. Wow.

It seems like every time I install a new Linux distro I say this: Linux just keeps getting better and better and better. Minor wifi hassles notwithstanding.

Well, I’ve started to upgrade my laptop to the latest Ubuntu. It installed reasonably cleanly, except wireless doesn’t magically work like it did with the old version. I find it difficult to believe that Ubuntu would take a step backward in this way, where something would Just Work(tm) in a previous version, but not in a newer version.

Anyway, I’ve posted a thread on the Ubuntu support forums; hopefully I’ll get some help there, and hopefully it won’t involve recompiling kernels.

In addition, my AIM account is acting weird; like my friends list was deleted somehow. So if you chat with me on AIM, say hi so that I can add you back to my list.

w00t! I’m writing this from my laptop, which arrived today and seems to be functioning normally. This, of course, means that I can upgrade my Ubuntu installation on my spare partition. It’ll be nice to return to KDE, or really to use KDE on the laptop for the first time!

This also means that my email is functioning normally again, email me at my usual address. Gmail is nice, but this is better.

Microsoft is squirming over the recent Massachussetts decision to use open standard data formats. Note the argument is not specifically choosing OpenOffice over MSOffice. It’s about how the data is stored. They are choosing to use the OpenDocument format, simply because it is more free.

Microsoft is free to use this license; it is an open standard and can be implemented without restriction. That’s the whole point. Yet,

Microsoft Office does not support OpenDocument and company executives said this week they have no plans to support that format in future versions of Office.

Despite Microsoft’s refusal to support OpenDocument, Eric Kriss, Secretary of Administration & Finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, says

“Microsoft could put capabilities within their XML Office suite right now to open, save and manipulate OpenDocument formats. It is certainly something they could do. ”

“What we’ve backed away from at this point is the use of a proprietary standard and we want standards that are published and free of legal encumbrances, and we don’t want two standards,” Kriss said.

Seems sensible to me. Yet Microsoft clouds the issue by claiming the XML is the main benefit of OpenDocument (XML is the language of OpenDocument, but it’s nothing more than a generic way to store data that is human-readable, like HTML):

Microsoft’s Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to “public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies.”

So two smoke screens there. The other one is about forcing a single format. This isn’t quite so, they are framing it wrong. It’s about openness, not restriction; Microsoft’s argument implies that someone will be restricted. Just not the case.

And speaking of Linux, the Kubuntu desktop is looking quite nice.